1. Background Field
Embodiments of the subject matter described herein are related generally to processing images to remove noise, and more specifically to automatically processing images having text to remove noise.
2. Relevant Background
Optical character readers (OCRs) conventionally convert images into machine-encoded text. Noise in images, however, may degrade the performance of OCR systems. Morphology techniques have been developed to remove noise, such as background texture or “speckle.” Conventional noise removal techniques are generally effective, but often modify the text in the resulting documents, sometimes making the text less readable.